On the Neosho
neighbor's floodlight
illuminates
riven skin
of a dead
shumard oak
foxes scream
then suddenly
the woods are quiet
in rough crotch
of black walnut
a lightning bug
looking for all the world
like a hot spark
freshly struck
from the flint
of a single bright star
barely visible
through the darkening
canopy
From What I Learned at the War (West End Press, 2016). Copyright © 2016 by Jeanetta Calhoun Mish. Published with the permission of the author.
Jeanetta Calhoun Mish
Jeanetta Calhoun Mish was born in Hobart, Oklahoma. She received a BA and an MFA in English from the University of Texas - Permian Basin and a PhD in English from the University of Oklahoma. Mish is the author of What I Learned at the War (Lamar University Press, 2015) and Work Is Love Made Visible: Collected Family Photographs and Poetry (West End Press/University of New Mexico Press, 2009), winner of the 2010 Oklahoma Book Award for Poetry. In 2019, she was named an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow.